If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, Europe, Appeasement

Please don't hurt us. We'll shut up. Promise.

Sucking the life out of everything

Europe is a black hole after all.

US “Hearts and Minds” Campaign More Successful in Beirut than in Islington

Former "Nightline" reporter Dave Marash has quit Al-Jazeera English, saying Thursday his exit was due in part to an anti-American bias at a network that is little seen in this country.

But it isn’t over the lack of cultural sensitivity of anyone in Qatar, it’s coming from that other presumptive “Religion of Peace”, the European left that virtually monopolizes the European media, especially the state-run media.

Marash said he felt that attitude more from British administrators than Arabs at the Qatar-based network.

Fitna, The Movie

Loved to Death

The “climate of violence” slag oft parroted on the BBC and in the MSM appears to have either paid off for the underhanded involved in it, or must prove to the ignorant that insurgants aren’t the thoughtful, reasonable people the people in the press suppose they are:

Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government.

The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media,

This is rather obvious to say the least. Knowing that “world” sentiment is behind you when you’re about to maim civilians and troops probably makes the difference in the minds of those wondering if they suspect their actions might not have repercussions for them personally later in life.

The study also found that attacks increased more in parts of Iraq like Anbar province, where there is greater access to international news media, measured by the proportion of households with satellite TV, which its authors say increases the credibility of their findings.

Let’s not kid ourselves. All of this gives a certain class of people more worried about their psyches than stability a real woody:

But not the right way. Consider this: what “alliance” consists of member states that actively try to undermine each other’s dearest security initiatives, in the process endangering the lives of soldiers sent to the battlefield? This is what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war, when President Chirac and Chancellor Schroder crawled all the way to Moscow (both countries were of course, historically speaking, familiar with that road) to enlist resurgent Russia’s Vladimir Putin in their anti-American alliance.

Vladimir Vladimirovitch couldn’t believe his luck. One of his central aims – destroying American hegemony – suddenly seemed within reach, with help from the inside! If he’d been paying attention, Putin would have noticed that his guests had already been pursuing the very same agenda for a number of years.

[snip]

The difference on the ground could have been enormous, as the experience of Bush senior’s Gulf War shows: a solid Euro-Atlantic coalition could have forced in more of the Arab countries as well – and made the cost for subversive action by countries like Syria and Iran much more punitive. That could have saved the Americans from dealing with a lot of crazies that were set loose in Iraq by those countries after the invasion.

And this is a result of the European model of “statesmanship”: the one where any sort of inaction is justified by waving the word “peace” around, and any other form of inaction is justified by tacitly propping up a dictator and undermining an “ally”.

Brave, Brave Sir Robin

Thanks to people on the left — as you all doubtlessly realize — we are heading towards a world of peace, of wisdom, of tolerance, of mutual understanding, and towards a world where all problems will be resolved through courageous talks, heartfelt discussions, and deep respect for one another.

To strike this point home, peace protesters wanting to bring peace to the world (or at least to West Chester, Pennsylvania) decided to hold a protest in said borough where they proceeded to live out their glorious ideology.

They started by looking loving, wise, and tolerant, they went on by having polite, respectful, and gracious talks with evil counter-protesters, and they ended by… showing the utmost courtesy to a young female blogger.





The young female blogger in question is on the right in the photo on bottom (no link to Code Pink despite the color of her cap). You can undoubtedly see what a threat someone like Skye would pose to a gallant and chivalrous peace protester like the white-bearded knight in her video…

Catch the Drift

A new blog, The Reactionary, sees the light…

The trickle down economy finally comes to Europe

The French get a chance to lap up Germany's crumbs. "Germany is doing fine, and that's trickling down to France..."

It’s for the Children!

” Progressives’ ” notions of free expression. If it’s social suicide, they’re all for it.

A bizarre battle has erupted over the arrest on child pornography charges of a man at a California public library, with library and county officials siding against the staffer who called police to arrest the alleged criminal.

Librarian Brenda Biesterfeld was fired from her job after disregarding her supervisor's orders not to call police.

Mercy buckets a RV

Obama tried to claim that the outbreak of Wright's poison was a distraction, not a real issue, and the press obediently echoed his complaint

Embracing Wright is not a distraction. It is a disqualification.

…The controversy was not about race. It was about [Obama's] longtime association with such a hatemonger and whether he shared the Reverend's vision.

…And if I just fall asleep, I, too, can live in the pod people's dream palace, where every conversation about race is our first conversation about race …for [a number of people] - like La Raza or the college professors scrambling to follow Obama's lead - when they say we need more conversation, they really mean their version of reality should win the day. Replace "conversation" with "instruction" and you'll have a better sense of where these people are coming from and where they want their "dialogue" to take us.

… Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright? … Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.

Around the World on All Fours

The poignant story about the man who went around the world on all fours, for change, for hope, for his beliefs, for all Mankind...

La BAF brings the world another stirring epic adventure wrapped inside another piece of outstanding cinematography…



(avec sous-titres français)

Banging their Spoons on their Highchairs

They’re garden-variety violence advocating neo-marxists who will probably tell you that they’re all for “peace”. A French “resistance” outfit can only get their loony drivel printed in Paris Match. It’s a little like as if the only press the Unabomer Ted Kaczynski could get was from People magazine or maybe Home and Garden based on his creative domestic use of leaf mold.

They’re demanding a “revolution tax” from the Élysée, but seem to be losing out on the pan-European competition for who can be the most resourceful and innovative. They should join the rest of the proletariat, and demand guaranteed unemployment for life.

They Do Impressions Too

Taking the edge off of Europe’s Obama-rama, a junket to Paris by American republican presidential candidate John McCain must be giving a moment of either cognitive dissonance or the kind of flattery that would remind them of an earlier age when they France was a world power.

LeMonde Al Jezeera sur Seine puts it in a subdirectory called “poubelle,” of course.

Meanwhile the bed-wetters over at Rue89 think that the whole thing is some sort of coup by an evil wizard named Sarkozy, who they think is American (as if we’d ever accept anyone European in our horrible baby-eating prejudice!) They forget that it was a stop on the way to Berlin from London, and are horrified that he’s a “francophobe,” even if he’s never said so because of this:

The reason for his bitterness against the French? John McCain was in the Vietnam War. In 1967, he was captured in the north of the country and spent five and a half years in captivity. He explained that during his years of detention, he has seen a French television team which appeared to show some sympathy for his jailers and indifference to American prisoners. He has not forgotten.

Remember, somehow he became a francophobe, but has also (somehow) been seduced.

Among the deliciously crazy comment posters, McCain, has now been christened a “theocon”. It must mean something to them. Of course these are European leftists, which means that they know everything there is to be known and corner the market (sorry, capitalist pun) on good sense. Their reaction are typified by:

I don’t know anything about American elections, but I think Obama has a good chance of being elected.

A people speak!

Sarkozy is a hack

No tax reductions. No reduction of social contributions by companies. The French won't be satisfied until they obtain the same standard of living as Bolivia.

Usine à gaz

The hot air of Zeropean hypocrisy.

Scripting the News

BBC celebrates the fall of Saddam by trying to pretend he didn’t even exist.

In a series of short (10-minute) films, dramatic haikus to mark the five-year anniversary of the preparations for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq (BBC2, Monday-Friday), the BBC has again shown the narcissism of small imaginations. Narcissism, because like so much of what passes for debate on Iraq, the programmes stare obsessively at the images the media themselves create of the conflict and its causes; small imaginations, because these images are tightly bounded by a tacit but iron will to confine all debate within variations on the theme of Americo-British responsibility for a disaster.

The films were shot in grainy sepia with a things-are-getting-worse musical score, and actors of the quality of Juliet Stephenson, Patrick Malahide, Stephen Rea and (next week) Kenneth Branagh playing such roles as Elizabeth Wilmshurst (Stephenson), the Foreign Office legal adviser who resigned because she judged the war illegal before it began; Sir Jeremy Greenstock (Malahide), the UK's ambassador at the UN charged with the impossible task of building a majority for war on the UN Security Council; General Tim Cross (Rea), the British Army's most experienced rebuilder, who struggled in vain to persuade Donald Rumsfeld to plan for the postwar Iraq; and Colonel Tim Collins (Branagh), who will - to shift from review to preview - next week re-enact the speech Collins made to men about to do or die - "We go to liberate not to conquer".

Biased-BBC also note the deep seeded one-sidedness of the tone of the reportage, complete with bringing on Richard Perle to play the goat. Why he keeps getting on the various BBC “newsy” opinion products, I’ll never know.

In all of this, there was not one hint of more than a sentence that the war was fought against one of the 20th century's greatest monsters. It was as if we were to dissect the crassness of Abraham Lincoln before the Civil War, with no reference to slavery; the tactical blunders of Winston Churchill without the Holocaust; or - let us be up to date - the ramshackle nature of the US-British-French coalition, with Milosevic's ethnic cleansing brushed out. This, for the defining conflict of the early 21st century, is what our media do: that is, they render it unintelligible.

Which is no exaggeration. It’s exactly the impression I got, which was to crane their necks to NOT mention key facts and events to prop up the angle of their coverage, more than the coverage itself.

At least they're good for something

Looking for a market bottom? It's here. Today's Sunday New York Times has 3 section feature cover stories (style, week in review, business) covering the recession. If the laggards over at the NYT have managed to pick up on this then you can take that as a contrarian buy signal.